Ayder Asanov 1928-2019

The happiness of arriving in Bakhchisaray, the old Crimean Tatar capital of Crimea, and turning down the path round the side of the Khan’s palace to the Usta crafts centre and there would be Ayder aga in his jeweller’s workshop.

Coffee in a jezver heated over a bunsen burner to drink; sweets to eat; all the beautiful filigree things he made to look at. And the talk. The wonderful, wonderful talk, about Bakhchisaray before 1944 full of workshops and fountains; about Uzbekistan and exile: the hungry steppe with its taste of salt on the wind, the faсtory where he was sent to work as a machinist for thirty years; about coming home to Crimea and working as a tractor driver and wedding musician. And all that time somehow his hands remembering the traditional Crimean Tatar skills of filigree silverwork that he’d learned from his father before he was seventeen and deported along with all the Crimean Tatars.

Ayder aga revived those skills single-handedly at home and in the Usta centre in Crimea, when he was already 70, and passed them on to his daughter and granddaughter and to a new generation of jewellers. He passed on some kind of spirit of old Bakhchisaray as well, I always felt, and the history and the stories too, and the jokes. These, lit by his humour and wit, his amazing love of life, and knowledge and kindness, are things I’ll treasure forever.

The picture of Ayder aga’s work, and of himself in his workshop, are from the Ukrainian edition of Dream Land. Many of his stories made it into the book; the character of the grandfather is of course partly inspired by him (although I never managed to capture his humorousness and the sheer variety of his life in all its hardships and joys).

The Usta workshop passed into history in 2017, now Ayder Asanov has as well. I feel so blessed that I knew him.